Three important buildings, designed by three important architects, tell the story of modern Los Angeles and its newspaper.

The first was designed by Gordon B. Kaufmann and built in 1935 as a new and modern home for The Los Angeles Times, and its distinctive Art Deco style has been an iconic fixture of the city’s skyline.

The second, designed by Rowland H. Crawford, is an office tower built in 1948 as the home for a new afternoon newspaper. That project failed, partly because the old street cars went away as the city embraced the automobile, but the building endures.

The third was designed by William L. Pereira, a 1973 office building to accommodate the top brass of the Times Mirror Co., the newspaper’s corporate parent. It was built at a time when the paper was growing under the publisher, Otis Chandler, who expanded the paper’s coverage, elevating it into the upper echelon of the country’s great newspapers.

“These three buildings tell the story not just of The Los Angeles Times, but of Los Angeles,” said Richard Schave, a local conservationist and historian who runs the tour company Esotouric.

Mr. Schave has spent the last 10 years, working alongside Harry Chandler, Otis Chandler’s son, preparing an application to gain monument status for the buildings, which wouldn’t necessarily prevent Omni from developing the site, but would restrict it.

He said he started the process shortly after Sam Zell, the Chicago businessman, took ownership of the paper. He immediately sensed that paper — and the building — was not in good hands.

It was just a coincidence that the city’s Office of Historic Resources accepted the application only recently, just as the newspaper was packing up to move. (The city’s Cultural Heritage Commission will hear the case on July 19.)

Struggles over the future of old buildings in Los Angeles can be long, nasty and complicated affairs, pitting historians and conservationists against deep-pocketed property developers.

One of the most famous cases was a battle in the 1990s over the future of the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. In that case, a New York real estate developer, Donald J. Trump, was thwarted in his aim to build the tallest skyscraper on the West Coast.

California Online

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Migrants from Central America arriving at the bus station in McAllen, Tex., after being released from government detention in June.CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times

• Facing pressure to expedite the reunion of migrant families separated at the U.S. border, the Trump administration is expected to announce today that it will streamline the process by which detained children are returned to their parents. [The New York Times]

•A woman was arrested in the beating of a 92-year-old man in Los Angeles County. According to reports, a witness said that the woman told the man to “go back to Mexico” as she beat him with a brick. [The New York Times]

• The battle for Orange County: Congressional seats in Southern California could determine both the Republican Party’s future in the state and the national contest for the House of Representatives. [Bloomberg]

• Five lithographs by Pablo Picasso, as well as works by Rufino Tamayo, Milton Avery, Richard Diebenkorn and other artists, went missing from The Los Angeles Times at some point between 2014 and 2018. [Los Angeles Times]

• Climate change milestone: California beat its self-imposed goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and did so a full four years before the target year of 2020. [The Sacramento Bee]

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Jade Quintanilla, a transgender woman from El Salvador, says she was robbed, exploited and abused on the trip to seek asylum in the United States.CreditKayla Reefer for The New York Times

• As they seek refuge from violence and persecution at home, L.G.B.T. migrants from Central America often encounter abuse, discrimination and exploitation. [The New York Times]

•Assemblyman Devon Mathis of Visalia was reprimanded last month for making sexual comments about fellow lawmakers. [A.P.]

• Bay Area colleges to close: Hundreds of employees will be laid off when the Art Institute of California, San Francisco, and the Alameda campus of Argosy University, a general education school, are closed in December. [SFGate]

• The head of one of the largest Buddhist organizations in the West, Shambhala International, has stepped aside after allegations of sexual abuse, leaving followers reeling. [The New York Times]

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The artist Laddie John Dill, a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit from 2011 seeking royalties under state law. Mr. Dill said of artists: “If they’re starting out and something goes up for auction, I think they should get a piece of it.”CreditStephanie Diani for The New York Times

• Visual artists will no longer be entitled to royalties from resales of their work in California after a federal appeals court in San Francisco restricted a state law that stemmed from droit de suite, the French concept of offering artists compensation for future sales. [The New York Times]

•Twitter will begin removing tens of millions of suspicious accounts from users’ followers, signaling a major new effort to fight fraud and restore trust on the platform. [The New York Times]

• Google’s efforts to build delivery drones and internet-beaming balloons are no longer just science projects. Both ventures are becoming independent businesses. [The New York Times]

And Finally …

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CreditIllustration by Jon Han

This week the Times Magazine tackles one of the fundamental issues of our age: Have the giant tech companies grown too powerful?

The article offers the first easy question to ask of the big tech companies: What are they, really? Certainly not what they tell consumers they are.

(Twitter and Facebook, for example, are not merely places to hang out with or meet people, but entirely new forms of discourse built around advertising.)

And the companies most vulnerable to easy questions tend to be the ones that can no longer be understood in terms of former competitors or current peers — because they don’t really have any.